How to Get Kids to Eat Their Healthy Brown Bag School Lunch

Whether kids use a brown paper lunch bag, eco-friendly lunch boxes, or whatever’s cool for taking a bagged lunch, parents often wonder if kids are eating the healthy lunch they packed.

Lunch ideas for healthy school lunches abound. But here’s how to go even further.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A collection of family-oriented used magazines
• Rubber cement
• Scissors
• An 11x17' piece of construction paper
• Baking cookbooks -- your own or extras from the library

1. Use the fact that kids like to imitate. Kids are born imitators. It’s their job to absorb the actions of fellow villagers around them so they’ll survive and mold into contributing villagers themselves. Unfortunately, junk food big business knows this all too well. Happy, hip, cool, rich, popular and beautiful kids shown having a wonderful time are also shown eating unhealthy foods on TV. Counter this somewhat with a refrigerator or kitchen poster. Collect used magazines for free from your library magazine exchange, friends and neighbors, or your recycle bin. Cut out photos of athletes and happy children eating and preparing healthy foods. Paste them onto an 11x17 piece of construction paper available in art and school supply sections of most drug and variety stores. Put the poster up where it’s seen often. Then just let it go. It’s message is absorbed passively.

2. Use the fact that kids are more faithful when they’re directly involved. When kids help choose and make their school lunch, they’re more faithful to not throwing or trading it away. Go through wholesome baking cookbooks with your kids, avoiding the kind that are full of white sugar coatings and dye, and make some selections with them. Remember you can always make some recipes healthier than the cookbook calls for, such as using organic whole oat flower, pastured butter, organic oats and organic raisins for oatmeal raising cookies. Set aside a weekly baking session time to bake healthy goodies together for that week’s lunch boxes. Once baked and cooled, properly wrap and store the healthy muffins, cookies or other lunch bag treats. On busy week nights, kids can toss their own already wrapped baked treat into their lunch bag quickly and easily.

3. Use “cuteness” and surprise only occasionally. Putting surprise notes in lunch boxes or a lunch bag, or using large cookie cutters to make whimsical shapes from sandwiches are great ideas. But if used too often, they become like celebrating Christmas every day of the year – even that loses its magic. Plus, when kids have grown too old to enjoy them, they’re left without having developed any foundational healthy eating habits without these tricks. Use them with younger kids for holidays, their birthdays, or when you know there’s going to be especially tempting unhealthy food at school that day.

Tips & Warnings

• Author disclaims liability and offers article for educational purposes only.
• Articles by this author are registered with the national copyright office.
• Parents are responsible for any activities involving their children.

[healthymomof5]

on 2/6/2009 I really had to this with my one child because the school lunch was causing her to gain weight and once she started bringing her own healthy lunch she lost the extra weight. Great article!5*